A long time Senator and Minister of the Crown in the Hawke Government, Arthur Gietzelt AO was an agent of the Communist Party of Australia, according to recently released ASIO archives and interviews with former ASIO officers and ALP figures, according to Troy Bramston.
Mr. Bramston is a former speechwriter for Kevin Rudd, adviser to the Rudd government and a regular contributor to The Contrarians on Sky News. ( “Paper trail leaves red prints on Labor's past,” The Australian 13 November, 2010)
Mr Bramston was the editor of The Wran Era and co-editor of The Hawke Government: A Critical Retrospective.
…unswerving allegiance…
The Communist Party of Australia had at its apogee, about 20,000 members. The party owed its unswerving allegiance to Joseph Stalin and the USSR.
For five decades it worked to end constitutional government here and make Australia a republic on the Soviet and later East European model.
The ASIO files — assessments, surveillance, witness accounts, photos and video — document Senator Gietzelt's extensive involvement in the CPA over several decades. He denies this.
…re-examination needed…
But agents believed he was funded by the CPA and acted as its agent and organiser inside the ALP and shared information about the ALP with leading CPA figures.Mr Bramston says it would have caused untold damage to the Labor Party if it had been revealed during the Whitlam or Hawke governments.
He writes: Former prime minister Bob Hawke said recently that the Ivanov spy scandal, revealing a link between an ALP lobbyist — David Combe — a minister and the Soviet embassy, could have destroyed his government. Imagine if it were revealed a CPA secret agent sat in Hawke's ministry.
He says it also matters because this new information requires a re-examination of the forces inside and outside the Labor Party during the Cold War. It undermines ALP leaders H.V. Evatt and Arthur Calwell, strengthens the legacy of Whitlam as a Labor moderniser and reformer, and it endorses the work of the NSW Labor right faction.
In short, it reshapes Australia's modern political history.
It means of course that B.A. Santamaria was justified in initiating and maintaining so tenaciously his campaign in the union movement against what he correctly saw as a fifth column.
The agenda to establish a people’s republic was not a home–grown movement. It was funded by and inspired by a foreign regime which had enslaved millions.
..postscript…
In the 1999 referendum, the Communist Party of Australia advocated a Yes vote in favour of the republican movement's preferred model.
No one was surprised. From the importation of this foreign ideology in the early twentieth century, the Communist Party was committed to removing the essential pillars from the Australian constitutional system, and making us a people's republic.
Becoming a politician's republic would at least remove one of the core checks and balances on the political institutions.
Some of the more eminent proponents of the 1999 model were to concede as much.
That did not stop them from blindly supporting a Yes vote during the campaign.
History will judge them.
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